Hard Rain (9 page)

T
urkey is a Moslem country, so I wasn’t expecting big things from the bar fridge in my room. I was happily rewarded, however, by a row of Johnnie Walker Black miniatures lined up along the door shelf like ducks at a shooting gallery. Was there such a thing as halal booze? Whatever. It was there for a reason – to get knocked down like those ducks, I supposed, even if it was blended sauce rather than single malt, my preferred variety. I cracked the seals on a couple of bottles and poured them together into a glass with ice, and drank half in a gulp. Dinner. Or maybe just the starter, I couldn’t decide. I examined my stomach and decided I was more tired than hungry, but the slug of whisky felt good.

I lay back on the double bed, closed my eyes and stared at the ceiling. It had just gone eleven o’clock, but it felt later than that. It’d been a busy day. I felt like a passenger who’d been riding events as they came along, catching them like streetcars. Two murders, both obviously related; no witnesses and, so far, no real clues. I downed the rest of the scotch and put the glass on the carpet beside my bed. I told myself I really should get up and have something to eat.

*

The room was dark and quiet when I woke, still fully dressed. The itch down inside the cast on my left hand had been the wake-up call. The bedside clock showed 5:10. I sat up, swung my feet over the side of the bed and kicked over the glass tumbler I’d placed on the carpet.

I rubbed my face with my good hand, turned on the bedside light and went to the john. Afterwards, I reached for my suitcase, a small Samsonite. I unlocked it and pulled out Nikes, shorts and a red Che Guevara T-shirt. A run would do me good, help me get things in some kind of order, even if it was only just to put one foot in front of the other. I’d started running a little over a year ago to help me recover from a case that had been bad news for me, and worse news for the guy I ended up planting in the ground. It was the case on which Masters and I had met, one that had also nearly killed her. After I’d been released from hospital, I’d started shuffling, which had eventually turned into running. Pounding a few regular miles had helped my body heal faster – or it could also have been all the sex with Anna that had done the trick. As I remembered it, getting regularly horizontal over that period hadn’t exactly been bad for her recovery either.

I changed and then used a knife from the kitchen to move the spiders I was convinced had taken up residence between the fibreglass cast and the skin on my wrist. Then, pocketing the room’s card key and a small wad of cash, I made my way to the elevator but decided to use the stairs instead, just to get things moving.

I walked through the foyer. The guy at reception was looking pasty with sleep deprivation. He tipped his forefinger at me. I knew what he was thinking: another crazy jogger – had to be American. Or maybe he was just thinking about the sack.

Outside the front door I got a surprise. Masters was bent over, stretching her hammies. She was wearing black skins with yellow stitching. I admired her legs. Her ass was hot enough to steam collars. I leaned against the wall. Why spoil the moment? Masters had gone back to the NYFD ball cap, her hair in the usual ponytail. No make-up. Those eyes of hers didn’t need any.

‘Morning,’ I said finally. The air was cold without being freezing
and the wind had gone. Perfect running weather.

‘Oh . . .’ she said, surprised, looking around. ‘You been standing there long?’

‘Long enough.’

‘Long enough to what – or shouldn’t I ask?’

I countered her question with one of my own. ‘When did you start running?’

‘A few months ago. Took your advice. I hated it at first, but I’ve come around.’

It would have taken Masters a while to get used to running without a big toe, something she’d lost in a car accident, the one that had nearly killed her back in Germany. At the time, we’d agreed that the toe was a fair trade for her life. ‘You should take Uncle Vin’s advice more often,’ I told her.

Masters smiled and replied, ‘Where you headed?’

‘Thought I’d wing it. You?’

‘The concierge gave me a map.’ She pulled it from the pocket of a navy-coloured sleeveless fleece vest. ‘You want to join me? We can sightsee before the crowds arrive.’

‘Slow before steady,’ I said, indicating for her to lead on. Loud hailers burst into life nearby with the day’s first call to prayer.

Masters shook her head at me before breaking into a jog, loping towards a collection of stone towers lit by yellow spotlights up on a hill. I caught up and settled into a rhythm beside her. ‘So, this Stringer guy . . . I trust him as much as I trusted the last CIA guy I worked with.’

‘You know what they say about judging a book by its cover, Vin?’

‘Stringer’s got a lot of covering.’

We paused at a corner for a tractor making its way to a road crew digging up the tramlines in the middle of the street. Masters led off again, picking up the pace.

‘You trust him?’ I asked.

‘Innocent until proven guilty, I think is how it goes.’

‘The US Embassy has lost a full bird colonel to killers who could’ve
taught Jack the Ripper a few tricks, but Stringer seemed more interested in dinner,’ I continued.

‘I think it was lunch.’

‘Whatever.’

‘How should he act?’

‘
Very
interested.’

‘Cooper, you don’t like the CIA, never have. In your eyes they’re always guilty of something. He could be just like the rest of us – stressed out, staying one step ahead of the meat grinder, doing too much and never getting enough of it done.’

Masters was right. Harvey Stringer was probably just like the rest of us, or maybe just like the rest of three of us put together.

We ran up a steep hill behind an ancient building and took the path around the front of the building along flagstones worn smooth by over a thousand years of footsteps. We stopped to take it all in, breathing hard. Across the square, another giant mosque sat bathed in warm orange spotlights. Behind it, against a luminous dark-navy sky, hung the burnished fingernail clipping of a crescent moon. The sun’s arrival was the barest rumour.

‘You know, Caesar could well have stood in this very spot,’ said Masters, a look approaching rapture on her face.

‘The guy who put croutons in salad? He stood here?’

‘Jesus, Vin . . .’ Masters sighed, turning away and breaking into a trot. I caught up. After a while she said, ‘So what do you want to do first? We’ve got the surveillance footage at 10:45.’

‘Set up interviews,’ I replied. ‘We should talk to this forensic shrink soonest – Cain’s contact.’

‘Doctor Aysun Merkit.’

‘If you say so.’ I didn’t have my notebook on me to check the name. ‘I want to get her reaction to this latest murder, see if she can weave some of that profiling magic for us.’ The cast on my hand was getting sticky with sweat, the spiders shifting about. ‘I also want to follow up on Portman’s appi-8 flight status, see if he’d been doing any flying in this part of the world.’

‘We can access that stuff through flight records back at Andrews,’ said Masters, timing the words with her breathing. ‘And maybe we can talk to someone down at Incirlik about this rape case – clear it off the board if we can.’

‘Yep.’

‘What about Portman’s manservant?’

My turn to be clever. ‘You mean Adem Fedai?’

‘Okay, okay. That’s one apiece,’ said Masters, now breathing hard.

We were heading up another hill, a steep one – like they had any other kind here. Both of us were feeling it but neither of us was willing to show it. Masters broke first.

‘You mind if we can the chitchat for a while?’ she asked.

Make that two–one. I took the lead and pushed the pedal to the floor, not that I’m in the least competitive or anything. I slipped into a comfortable lead and a good rhythm, watching the waves of cobblestones rush by beneath my running shoes. The hill plateaued in the courtyard of some ancient mosque – another one.

After a while, the fact that I was running disappeared and I was left with just my thoughts. I was thinking that if what we had here were serial killings, I had no experience with that kind of crime. What I did know was that making a breakthrough would revolve around finding the connection between the victims, the commonality. From this knowledge could potentially spring a lead to the killers. Only we already had the connection between the victims, didn’t we? The perps were going easy on us. Portman was the US Air Attaché handling any government issues between Washington and Ankara with the F-16 upgrade, and Bremmel was his opposite number at TEI, the program’s engine supplier. Simple. Or was it? Burnbaum, Stringer and Portman: an ex-spy, a current spy, and an appi-8 action man. I’d had enough experience with Washington’s notion of team building to know that people like this were most likely put together for a reason.

There were the twelve bones taken from Portman. The phalanges of his right hand recovered from Bremmel accounted for three of them. If Masters was right and the bones were removed in order to be left
on future victims, there were as many as nine more murders to come. Adding Portman himself and Bremmel, the body count would be eleven. Was the number meaningful? Was the interval between the murders – three days – significant? Were the
types
of bones taken from Portman relevant? What about the bones removed from Bremmel’s butt? Were the killers really saying ‘fuck you’ in a playful, psychopathic let’s-have-fun-with-the-flatfoots kind of way?

I went through all these questions so many times I started to feel like I was running in circles. At that point I realised I probably was. I stopped, opened my eyes to the world around me and realised I was looking out across the Bosphorus. I leaned on a rusted railing and scoped the surroundings to get my bearings. The sun was due to rise, Masters was nowhere to be seen, and I was completely lost.

A horn tooted and a cab drove up. The driver leaned across and shouted out through the passenger-side window at me. ‘Taxi!?’

I recognised the guy and hadn’t expected to. I walked over. ‘Emir, right?’ I said.

Hearing his name surprised him. ‘Yes, sir, how do you know this?’

‘You took me to the US Consulate-General yesterday, remember?’

‘Oh yes, that was me, sir. Where you going now? The consulate?’

‘You following me?’ I asked. I didn’t believe he was. I could see from his face he had no recollection of the fare. Maybe all we non-moustachioed Americans looked alike to him.

‘No, sir.’ Then he thought about my question and said, ‘Unless you
like
me to follow you.’

I put an end to the immediate conversation and climbed in the back seat. It was coming up to 07:00 and I was feeling a little behind schedule.

‘You know the Hotel Charisma, in the Sultanahmet?’ I said.

‘Yes, I know it. It is far,’ he replied. ‘You came from there? You have run a long way. Do you mind putting on the seat?’

Putting on what? I wondered.

Emir passed back a green towel, solving the mystery. ‘I want to keep taxi nice for tourist.’

I shrugged. My legs were sticking to the thick, shiny plastic encasing the seats. I sat on the towel.

‘American?’ he asked, leaning back, talking out the side of his mouth.

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Americans – good people. You like Istanbul?’

‘Emir. You got any Turkish music?’ If I didn’t shut the guy up, he was going to tell me again that a stay in Istanbul was never long enough if I ever had to leave, and I could do without the déjà vu.

I was starting to cool down when Emir pulled up to the Hotel Charisma, just as Masters stepped out the door and checked the street for cabs. She waved at Emir as he pulled over. I handed him a ball of money, forgot about the receipt, and hopped out.

‘What took you, Vin? I’ve had breakfast and a shower. And getting a cab ride . . .’ She shook her head and tut-tutted. ‘You must be really unfit,’ she said as she made Emir’s day and climbed in.

Back to evens, not that I was keeping score.

I was maybe forty minutes behind Masters by the time I made it to the consulate-general, but she wasn’t there. I killed a half-hour chasing up Portman’s flight log from Andrews AFB Flight Records Office. They said it was going to take them some time getting back to me. How much time did it take to punch a code on a keyboard, copy the information and send it online? Days, apparently.

I dialled the number Cain had given me for Doctor Aysun Merkit. Her secretary answered. From the sound of the voice, it was either a guy who answered or an old lady who chain-smoked. This being Turkey, my money was on the smoker. She told me the doctor wasn’t in, but I was happy to settle for an appointment with her in the mid afternoon.

Next, I sniffed around TEI, otherwise known as Tusas Engine Industries, where Bremmel worked as General Electric’s point man on those engines. Bremmel wasn’t a resident of Istanbul. According to records accessed with a little local police cooperation, he lived with his wife in Eskisehir where TEI was headquartered, a city more or less 120 miles
south-east of Istanbul. I also knew from his email exchanges with Portman that Bremmel spent a fair bit of time at the Incirlik Air Base, close to the border Turkey shared with Iraq, where the work of those F-16s was being performed. ‘Bremmel’ wasn’t exactly a common name in Turkey, and I located his home phone number through an online directory. Hired help at his home informed me that Mrs Bremmel had gone home to Seattle to visit relatives – which was a long way from jumping on her husband in a room at the Istanbul Hilton.

I went back to skimming through Portman’s emails. An hour and a half later I pushed back from the desk for a breather, no closer to any kind of breakthrough. From the thousands of items, I could see that Emmet Portman and Dutch Bremmel were reasonably friendly, though not overly chummy. The relationship between the US Government, TEI and the Turkish authorities, which included its Air Force and various government ministers, was a gauntlet of protocol issues, complicated by the usual supply-and-demand headaches – the wrong parts in inventory, aircraft with incorrect serial numbers delivered for upgrade, and so on and so forth – and every one of these stumbling blocks and hiccups was accompanied by at least thirty to forty email exchanges. There were hundreds of emails between Ward Burnbaum, who represented the interests of the US State Department, and Portman. I skipped through a few dozen at random and found nothing I wouldn’t have expected.